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The unparalleled outrage of clearing the Upper-Wabash,
being sufficiently insisted upon, answered the purpose as
well as any device they could have contrived. The triumph
of Puffer was complete: he had carried his election by a
handsome majority—bowling down Mr. John Blinker, majestically
as he carried himself, as easily as a nine-pin with
a rolling bottom—Hobbleshank's strong recruits (of which
Puffer had just now heard) coming in to give the decisive
blow. The popular mind still heaving and surging,
searched for a channel through which to vent the
enthusiasm, (in such cases there's always a little over)
which had not been exhausted in the contest itself. The
Bottomites resolved to make a public demonstration of their
victory—one to allure new friends and terrify old enemies—
and a street parade, a Grand Procession by torch-light, was
fixed upon as most imposing. The newspapers began immediately
to trumpet the show: the wire-pullers and busybodies
in every direction were on the alert, dusting their banners
and waking up their retainers. In a week from the
election the preparations were concluded, and at sun down
of the day appointed, the forces of the procession began to
assemble in the Houston-street Square, East-River. Two
men were seen with highly flushed faces, the dawn of the
procession, to roll off a couple of barrels around a corner
from a neighboring pump, and hoist them upon a truck behind
a canvass banner, which denoted that these were two genuine
and unadulterated barrels of the water of the UpperWabash,
in its aboriginal condition before the clearing
under the New Bill. A few minutes after two other flushfaced
gentlemen came around another neighboring corner
with a couple of rolling barrels, which were duly planted
on a second truck, and which were, in like manner, given
out as so much pure fluid drawn from the mighty Hudson
by an aged sailor, who would ride in one of the barouches.
Presently a body of horsemen, with new beaver hats and
blue ribbons at their button-holes, came scampering distractedly
into the square; and rode about issuing enthusiastic
orders, and inspecting with military activity the

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condition of the square, from one end to the other. These
were the marshals of the procession; and in less than a
couple of minutes they were followed by numerous detachments
of one kind and another, dropping in at different
points. In an hour the square was full of horsemen,
pedestrians, barouches, carts, banners—and for a time there
was an unbroken hubbub of shouting voices, and an inextricable
confusion and entanglement of all classes and orders
of society.

By dint of driving up and down at the top of their
speed—riding every now and then over a child or an old
woman—assailing a detachment of clamoring clerks in a
high voice of command, or imploring, with bended knees
in their saddles, a squad of mounted cartmen—they succeeded
in forming the line. A gentleman in a dirty round-jacket
filled his trumpet till it overflowed; a short-legged
drummer dashed his sticks against the parchment; the
crowd gave three cheers, as they do when a ship breaks
from her stays, and the Great Bottomite Procession was
launched upon the streets. There was a barouche containing
a standard-bearer, with two committee-men to fill
up, that led the van; then a barouche bearing two ancient
residents on the Wabash, (brought on expressly for
this occasion,) extremely pale and sickly—as might have
been expected—and obliged to be fed out of a bottle, by a
boy in the carriage with them, to keep the breath in their
body. This device the crowd approved of, and gave
three cheers more as they trotted in the wake of the procession.
Then there was a barouche with two fishermen—
great, sturdy, grampus-like fellows—educated, of
course, on the banks of the Hudson, and chewing pig-tail,
in evidence of the holiness and majesty of the anti-Wabash
cause.

But when behind these the crowd caught sight of another
barouche—wrapped round and round with banners—
the very horses trotting forward in trowsers made of striped
bunting, there was no limit to the popular enthusiasm. In
this, the Hero of Kipp's Bay—the redoubtable Champion
of New-York—the illustrious Hopkins himself, stood up,
and removing his hat, waved it pleasantly to the crowd,
at full arm's length, as though he was bailing up their
cheers, and pouring them out of the hat into the barouche.

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High above his head danced the banner wrought by the
dark-eyed young lady—the blank filled as she had wished—
“Uncompromising Hostility to the Clearing of the Wabash.—
For Congress, Puffer Hopkins, the Hero of New-York!”

In the carriage with Puffer rode Mr. Halsey Fishblatt,
who had assumed a clean ruffle, of extraordinary dimensions,
and whose very waistcoat seemed swelling and
ready to burst with a speech, with which he was no doubt
prepared to explode the moment he should be touched. Then
there were the fire companies—the earnest and ardent
friends of the successful candidate—all in their red shirts
and leather caps, dragging their engines by the rope, and
joining in the cheerings of the crowds with lusty voice.
A throng of sailors, surging and swaying along, twelve
abreast and arm in arm, in duck trowsers, blue shirts, and
hats of tarpaulin; and then, in an uninterrupted line, in
seventeen carriages, the seventeen wards of the city, represented
by as many emblematical gentlemen; the first,
second and third being solid, substantial old fellows, with
well-fed persons, and a cross of the Dutchman in their
look; the sixth a strapping, raw-boned genius, with a cane
in his hand quite large enough for a club or shillelah; the
seventh a plain citizen, evidently, by his dress and aspect,
rising rapidly in the world; the fifteenth a dainty gentleman,
with a well-plaited ruffled shirt, and copious rings
upon his fingers; and so throughout the seventeen. In
strong contrast came a shoal of woe-begone, unhappy
looking gentlemen, who called themselves, in a portentous
banner which they bore above their heads, “The Proscribed
Watchmen,” (they complained that the public
offices, to which they had acquired a legal right, by ten
years uninterrupted possession, had been taken from
them,) and they wore their caps hind-foremost to denote
the depth and agony of their bereavement. With these—a
fellow-sufferer in a common cause, there rode, in a single
gig, a lady of a venerable aspect, who had for fifteen
years dispensed at one of the public watch-houses, pigs-feet
and coffee, to the watchmen, as they came in from
their rounds. She was the mother of five children—her
husband now dead, had lost an arm in an election riot—
and she, a widow, had been ruthlessly thrust from the

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watch-house. All this was expressed in the banner which her
eldest boy carried above her, on which were painted the
Goddess of Liberty, with a crape around her liberty-cap,
(to denote the lady's widowhood;) a one-armed ghost appearing
from a neighboring tomb, (her late husband;) and
a table spread in a corner of the standard, at which five
small skeletons were represented as feeding on pea-soup
out of a large blue bowl.

This division of the show was received by the crowd
with an outbreak (as it was described in the newspapers)
an outbreak of irrepressible indignation. Public opinion is
always outraged in such cases, and follows the perpetrators,
they said, as surely as the shadow the sun; and here came
public opinion itself. Through all the length and breadth
of the United States there is, at all times, supposed to be
rolling a great sphere or ball—pausing sometimes at villages
which it takes in its way, then at cities or hamlets—
but ever rolling on, on, along the seaboard, up mountainsides—
bounding and rushing through vallies—growing
steadily larger, larger, and keeping up a horrible rumbling
and tumult wherever it moves. The knocking to and fro
of this mighty ball is a favorite sport of congressmen, editors
and others, who find a great diversion in their sedentary
and arduous labors in racketting it about.

It was this mighty ball that was set in motion in behalf
of the lady in the single-gig; and typifying this—public
opinion, which rolls and gathers like an avalanche—a
great canvass wheel was now pressed forward, at the rear
of the single-gig, by an axle, at either end of which toiled
a dozen or two sallow gentlemen with ricketty legs, who,
in the present case, stood for Congress and the public
press. Directly behind public opinion, and taking such
advantage of its motions as he could, in a special hackney-coach
to preserve his invaluable health from the assaults
of the night air, came Colonel Clingstone, a venerable
revolutionary veteran, whose patriotic ardor had been incontestably
established by his eating an entire British ox
(the property of a cowboy) during the first week of the
war, which proved to be so substantial diet that he was
able to live on the very name or shadow of it ever after:
seasoned with a rumor of some gunshot wound or other.
In the rear of the venerable colonel—who did not fail

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from time to time to show his frosty head at one window or
the other, just to see how public opinion got along—there
swarmed a lean, cadaverous, deadly-looking troop, in
soiled garments and battered hats, and headed by our
electioneering agent, Mr. Nicholas Finch, with a banner
representing a group of citizens greatly cast down, and
with pocket-handkerchiefs at their eyes, weeping profusely
at the Tomb of Washington. It was observed of these
gentlemen, who had chalked their faces to an interesting
paleness to create public sympathy—that whenever the
revolutionary veteran thrust his portly person into view,
one or other of them would mutter between his teeth—
“Cu's' that old chap! he's had fat pickings forty years
from a pin-prick!” The sympathies of the crowd were
evidently with the cadaverous followers of Mr. Finch.

“I know them fellers,” said a squint-eyed bar-tender,
who was on the look-out; “them's Finch's hunters;
they're wonderfully ill-used gem'men—they wants berths
in the custom-house, for the sake of their country, and
their country wont let 'em take the berths! Aint that a
hard case, Joe?”

“Crueller nor the anaconder!” answered Joe, a dependent
of a neighboring bakery; “I say let every man
bake his bread in the gov'ment oven, if he likes to. Don't
we own the gov'ment—and what's gov'ments good for
if they can't do a man's private washing and ironing, and
bread-making? That's my views.”

The lean gentlemen, in a word, were office-seekers,
ambitious to serve the public on any terms—belonged to
either side, or both sides, as occasion required. It was a
great wrong to keep them out of place, for if they expended
half the ardor in serving the public which they did to
serve themselves, public affairs must have been managed
with extraordinary prudence and despatch. Poor fellows!
they were in a sad plight; no bread nor beef at home,
and their ungrateful country refusing to cash their bills.
It was as much as Mr. Finch could do—moving about and
whispering cheerful promises in their ears—to keep them
in spirits to go through their parts in the procession.

Behind these, comfortably quartered in a series of light
wagons, followed a body of gentlemen in high glee, rosy-gilled,
laughing and making merry of every object on the

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road. They seemed entirely at their ease, and to have
nothing to do in this world but to carry certain torches
which they waved and flaunted about their heads as in
pastime, and merely to show the world how comfortable
they were. It is hardly necessary to add, that the gentlemen
in the light wagons were office-holders: and that
in evidence their grateful remembrance of the man who
founded such a government, they carried a full-length of
the Father of his country. On a closer inspection certain
members of the Bottom Club might have been discovered
settled in the light wagons; they had doubtless
left off ameliorating the condition of society in order to devote
their undivided attention to their own comfort and the
public service, on which their outcry had quartered them.
Behind these, singling himself out from the common herd,
a little man, marched about a platform, which he had
caused to be built at his own private expense and borne
up on the shoulders of four sturdy partizans, blowing a
small brass trumpet, of great depth of wind, from time to
time, and waving a small white flag with great earnestness
about his head. This gentlemen, too, was ambitious of
office, and by no means inclined to have the magnificence
of his claims confounded with the demerits of the gentry
who plodded on foot.

And then came scampering forward Mr. Sammis at the
head of a hundred and fifty mounted cartmen; and as
they rode in their frocks, tottering and tumbling in their
saddles, they resembled not a little a hundred and fifty
clowns in an equestrian pantomime, slightly beside themselves
with strong drink.

There was a part of the line obscured by a cloud of
hangers-on, from which a report of lusty voices constantly
broke in cries of “Here's the extra infantry!” “Terrible
murder, sir,—don't tread on my toes!” “Only three
cents—and full of pipin'-hot soocides and seductions!”
When, in turning a corner, the cloud broke, it disclosed in
their usual undress uniforms of baggy caps, half-coats and
inadequate breeches, a detachment of news-boys bearing
aloft, with an air of haughty defiance, numerous paper ensigns
on which were inscribed, “Freedom of speech and
plenty o' pies!” “Long Nines and Liberty!” and other
decisive axioms of the news-boy creed.

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